The Hollow Crown: The Wars of the Roses and the Rise of the Tudors (33 page)

In the three and a half weeks that followed his letter to Henry Tudor, Buckingham did his best to raise an army from his lands in south Wales, assembling men and munitions at Brecon Castle. He was hampered by abysmal weather: autumn skies lashed rain on the land and made troop movements difficult and unpleasant. Buckingham was also hamstrung by his own reputation as a ‘sore and hard-dealing man’ who was despised by the tenants he was attempting to stir into action. Nevertheless, in the end he managed to assemble a ‘great force of Welsh soldiers’, while also contacting the perpetually fractious men of Kent, who never needed much encouragement to rise up against the established order. He ignored letters of increasing belligerence sent to him by Richard, demanding that he give up his plotting immediately and come to the royal presence.
19

Unfortunately for Buckingham, the men of Kent began their rebellion too early. They attempted to rise on Friday 10 October but very swiftly fell away again when the duke of Norfolk, Thomas Howard, led a resistance force out of London. Further unrest fanned out across the south of England, with local risings in Sussex, Essex, Oxfordshire, Berkshire, Hampshire, Wiltshire and into the south-west in Somerset, Devon and Cornwall. But
these do not seem to have been especially well co-ordinated. Neither did the threat of yet another outbreak of civil war command any serious noble support. Margaret Beaufort’s husband, Lord Stanley, declined to raise his men in the north-west, and most of the rest of the regional magnates also sat on their hands. Buckingham hesitated and did not begin his western campaign until Saturday 18 October, by which time it was too late. When the duke prepared to march east into England he found that ceaseless rain had caused the banks of the Severn to burst, flooding the surrounding lands and making the river quite impassable. The Welshmen in the duke’s army were ‘brought to the field against their wills and without any lust to fight for him’. They had been browbeaten in the early part of October and by the end of the month were inclined to go home, dry their feet and avoid any more contact with the man who commanded them.
20

Buckingham headed north-east, into the marches, and did his best to raise the people of Herefordshire. Unfortunately, news had already reached them that Richard III was moving with an army from the north towards the rebellious duke, upon whose head there was now a £1,000 bounty for having ‘traitorously turned upon us contrary to the duty of his liegance’.
21
Faced with failure, Buckingham abandoned what remained of his army and went into hiding in Shropshire, in the house of his servant Ralph Bannister, whom he had known and trusted since his childhood. But trust had its limits. On 1 November Bannister sold Buckingham out. He was captured and taken to Salisbury in Wiltshire by Sir James Tyrell, where Richard, having ridden imperiously through his realm in search of the rebels, now held court. Richard’s men interrogated Buckingham, who confessed ‘without torture’ and asked to ‘have liberty to speak with king Richard’. His request was flatly refused and on Sunday 2 November the duke was hauled into the marketplace in Salisbury and beheaded.

Many centuries later a decapitated skeleton, with its right arm
also hacked off, was found beneath the kitchen of a pub called the Saracen’s Head, on the spot where Buckingham was supposed to have been executed. As soon as the bones were touched they disintegrated, leaving only dust behind them.
22

As Buckingham’s head rolled in the dirt of Salisbury’s market square, Henry Tudor was being tossed by the waves in the sea. His mother had kept him informed of events in England, and Henry had spent September and October in Brittany fitting out a fleet of fifteen ships, sufficient to carry a force of five thousand soldiers across to England for an invasion. His sponsor in this great adventure was his long-time jailer Duke Francis II, who gave the twenty-six-year-old exile ships, sailors and a considerable amount of money in loans to help them on their way. They pushed off with a good wind from Paimpol, a pleasant fishing village on the northern tip of the Breton coast, probably on the night of 1 November. But as anyone who had braved the Channel during the stormy months of darkness knew, the weather could quickly turn foul. Henry and his uncle Jasper were blown by ‘a cruel gale of wind’, which drove some of their ships north to Normandy, while others were sent back to Brittany. Eventually, Henry’s ship limped in sight of the English coast at Poole, where it anchored alongside the one other vessel that had passed safely through the tempest. On land they spied a number of lookouts, clearly waiting for their arrival. But something in the scene struck Henry as ominous. He sent a small craft to investigate the situation on shore: when it made contact with the men on land, they all cried that they were sent from Buckingham to greet Henry and bring him to the successful rebel headquarters, ‘which the duke himself had at hand with a notable excellent army’.
23
It was a trap, and Henry could smell it. The wind was still blowing in the direction of Normandy. He weighed anchor and followed it,
leaving England to a triumphant Richard III and abandoning the fight for another day. It was a very wise move.

Henry had been proclaimed king in his absence at Bodmin on 3 November by a small group of English rebels, but as he returned to Brittany he found that his position was as weak as it had ever been. His actions during Buckingham’s rebellion had confirmed him as an unrepentant enemy of the English crown. The possibility of rehabilitation into the English nobility – so close in 1482 – was now dead. The only option left to Henry was to claim the crown outright. In a ceremony held at Vannes Cathedral on Christmas Day 1483, at which his supporters swore homage to him as if he were an anointed ruler, he in return swore an oath to marry Elizabeth of York as soon as his claim to the crown was realised. How exactly it was to be realised was not very clear. International relations stood in a muddle, for on 30 August 1483 Louis XI of France had died, leaving a
thirteen-year-old
successor, Charles VIII, whose regent was his elder sister Anne. Henry’s value as a pawn in relations between England, France and Brittany was now diminished, as was the likelihood that Francis II – whose health was beginning to fail – would wish to finance a second invasion of England.

Henry’s main source of hope lay with the small but swelling community of exiles who fled England following the failure of Buckingham’s rebellion with their lives in danger and their property at default. There was no shortage of outcasts. In January 1484 Richard III called his first parliament and used it to deliver a full-scale attack on his enemies, to defile the memory of his brother’s reign and to secure the allegiance of all the lords of England to his own rule and the future rule of his heir, Edward of Middleham, prince of Wales. The act
Titulus Regius
praised Richard as the only legitimate heir to his father Richard duke of York and condemned the ‘ungracious feigned marriage’ between Edward IV and ‘Elizabeth Grey’ – as Elizabeth Woodville was
now to be known – which, the act stated, ‘was presumptuously made without the knowledge and assent of the lords of this land, and also by sorcery and witchcraft committed by the said Elizabeth and her mother Jacquetta, duchess of Bedford’.
24
At a specially convened meeting in a committee room in Westminster, ‘nearly all the lords of the realm’ swore an oath of adherence to Prince Edward ‘as their supreme lord, in case anything should happen to his father’.
25
Then the parliament set about systematically destroying those whom Richard perceived to have crossed him the previous autumn.

The January parliament passed attainders against a large number of Richard’s enemies, most prominently Thomas Grey, marquess of Dorset, John Morton, bishop of Ely, Lionel Woodville, bishop of Salisbury, and Peter Courtenay, bishop of Exeter, as well as Margaret Beaufort – who retained her life and liberty but had her lands transferred to her husband. Dorset and the bishops were therefore among those who took up residence in Brittany, where they found themselves in the company of Sir Edward Woodville, Richard Woodville and numerous loyal old servants of Edward IV, including Sir Giles Daubeney and John Cheyne, who had been personal attendants to the old king, John Harcourt, once a faithful follower of Lord Hastings, and Reginald Bray, who was connected to Margaret Beaufort and the Stanleys. All were wanted men and many had lost virtually everything. All now clung to the desperate notion that Henry Tudor might one day invade England again, to cast aside yet another anointed king.

Richard III may have been a usurper, but when he turned his attention to issues of more general government he was capable of being generous and sympathetic. Over Christmas 1483 his mind had been on the plight of England’s poor, who found themselves unable to get justice due to the high costs of the legal system.
A grant dated 27 December shows him granting a yearly payment for life of £20 to his clerk John Harington, who served the court of requests. This court was designed to hear the ‘bills, requests and supplications of poor persons’, offering a route to legal redress that would not ruin them financially.
26
After the New Year celebrations he travelled around Kent, and just as he had done on his northern progress, he refused to accept expensive gifts from the towns through which he passed – a richly decorated purse stuffed with more than £30 of gold was graciously declined at Canterbury, with the king ordering its contents ‘to be redelivered to the said persons from whom the said sum had been collected’.
27

The parliament of January 1484, when it was not concerned with the business of legitimising Richard’s claim to the crown, also suggested that his inclinations as king were towards the principles of justice and fairness. One law granted that ‘every justice of the peace in every county, city or town shall have authority and power to grant bail … at his or their discretion’ – meaning that all people convicted of felonies could in theory be freed until they faced trial, and not suffer confiscation of their goods before they had had a chance to defend themselves in court.
28
Forced loans known as benevolences, which had been used by Edward IV, were declared illegal. Where taxes were levied, they were imposed most heavily on foreign merchants, yet even here Richard showed himself to be relatively enlightened, ensuring that the flourishing new book trade was exempted from import duties, and that every writer, printer and bookbinder could do business freely, ‘of whatever nation or country he may or shall be’.
29

All the same, the extreme circumstances surrounding Richard’s ascent to the throne meant that all the progressive policies in the world would not bring unity to his realm overnight. One of his most serious problems was the fact that he remained forced to rely heavily on the men who had brought him to power,
rather than constructing a broad and inclusive government that represented the interests of the whole realm. His chief servants, who included William Catesby, Richard Ratcliffe, Francis, Lord Lovell, Sir James Tyrell and Robert Brackenbury, were all unconnected to Edward IV, and mostly men who had served Richard as duke.
30
His household was packed with northerners whom he could trust, a fact which worsened the sense of a north–south divide to his kingship.

Worst of all, Richard was simply unlucky. The king suffered the first personal tragedy of his reign on 9 April 1484 when his beloved little son, Prince Edward, died. He was about ten years old. The child had grown up in the castles of the north, including his birthplace of Middleham, where he enjoyed the life of learning and entertainment common to all boys of his class, with trips in a chariot about the countryside, the japery of fools in his household and the occasional involvement in ostentatious ceremonies at which his father had his status as heir to the crown publicly proclaimed.
31
But childhood was a perilous time of life, and Prince Edward’s death, following a short illness, came as a crushing blow to Richard and Queen Anne. The news reached them at Nottingham and it threw the bereaved royal couple into ‘a state almost bordering on madness, by reason of their sudden grief’.
32
The long-term hopes of any usurper’s regime depended on the security of succession. While Richard had fathered several bastard children, including one John of Pontefract, whom he knighted at York in 1483 and acknowledged as ‘our dear bastard son’ when he appointed him captain of Calais in 1485, Edward of Middleham was the only child who could have been an acceptable heir to the crown. His death was therefore a catastrophe, even to a ruler as tenacious as Richard III.
33

Prince Edward’s death made it essential that Richard should step up his attempts to capture Henry Tudor. With Francis of Brittany ailing, the king of England made his move through Pierre
Landais, the Breton treasurer. By September 1484, he was close to an agreement that would exchange Henry’s person for the title of the earldom of Richmond, which in ancient times had been given by English kings to dukes of Brittany. By chance, Henry was warned of these negotiations just as they neared their conclusion. The Tudors, with their court of exiles, had established themselves in Vannes – but it was clear that the duchy, for so long a haven, had now become a dangerous place. Early in September Jasper Tudor led a small advance escape party over the Breton border near the town of Rennes. Two days later Henry followed him, galloping over the frontier disguised as a groom. By the end of September, most of his adherents had joined them. It was a highly dangerous dash for freedom, since outside Breton territory the Tudors enjoyed no safe-conduct and none of the guaranteed diplomatic protection that for many years had kept them safe. But in 1484, with an heirless Richard determined to hunt and exterminate his chief remaining foe, it was a gamble worth taking.